Too Good to Be True: The Failure of Defensive Managers During Recent Inflationary Shocks

Too Good to Be True: The Failure of Defensive Managers During Recent Inflationary Shocks

The failure of the returns-based approach, along with some interesting dynamics observed in factor contributions, opens an extremely interesting avenue for future analysis. What role did the macroeconomic regime (inflation, top line growth, and interest rates) play in the “defensiveness” of strategies, and what can be done to avoid misclassifying strategies during sharp regime changes?